Programmability: A Key Part of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has gone from a buzzword to a fully built strategy for many organizations. The idea of leveraging technology to improve performance, agility, and decision making has real value in today’s instant everything economy. We have seen this coming for some time and know that technology enables great enhancements to achieve these benefits. We also understand better than anyone that the network and infrastructure are critical to successfully benefit from digital transformation. All of a sudden network elements become the center of the digital transformation universe.

We have talked for years about the emergence and now implementation of technologies like SDN, NFV, cloud, and programmable networks. This programmability is what I want to discuss today as it is a key element in the digital transformation wave. As the trend became a reality, organizations started adding proprietary REST APIs onto their equipment to help with programmability and automation. The challenge is this doesn’t help or address multi-vendor issues/environments. We have seen such a problem before with CLIs and automation. With the modern scale of the things such as NFV, proprietary REST APIs simply take this old problem and make it worse. Ultimately, by not having standards-based programmability, they are creating digital mayhem instead of digital transformation.

Through standards-based programmability, organizations can achieve flexibility, scalability and deliver innovative new solutions and services quickly. This means you can roll out new services and products faster than the competition at the high quality that your customers expect. In order for programmability to be stable and meet the quality required, it needs to be based on standards such as NETCONF, RESTCONF, YANG, and standards defined YANG data models.

So how can you ensure that the network elements which you produce, whether they are physical or virtual, have the programmability needed to support your customer’s digital transformation strategies? With Tail-f’s ConfD, you can simplify operations and replace, high-touch programmability models with a real-time, automated, standards based approach. ConfD’s framework leverages the NETCONF and RESTCONF protocols, YANG data models and a centralized configuration database to deliver unified, programmable management capabilities.

There are three core advantages when using ConfD:

Streamlined Development: It is faster and cheaper to build management interfaces and applications with ConfD.

Robustness: Management interfaces and applications developed with ConfD are more complete, more reliable and more functional than tools developed in-house from the ground-up.

Your Largest Customers Prefer NETCONF/YANG Management Tools: This may well be the most compelling reason to use ConfD. Large service providers, such as AT&T and Deutsche Telekom have shown a strong preference for the NETCONF and YANG standards.

Digital Transformation is a game changer for organizations looking to make quick decisions, automate processes and deliver innovative outcomes. Standards-based programmability not only helps achieve digital transformation, but also ensures organizations are able to support any multi-vendor environment. Learn more about ConfD